


Legends Never Die

by princesscas



Category: Dragon Quest XI
Genre: Drustan and Serenica only mentioned, Gen, I wrote a Morcant fic, Please Forgive me, Pre-Canon, Reincarnation, anyway, character death tagged just to be safe, it's Morcant Hours, probably the strangest thing I've ever written, why. why did I do this.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:01:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26073823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princesscas/pseuds/princesscas
Summary: Morcant is not an average sorcerer. He is much more talented, much more adventurous, much more power-hungry. Most can make mistakes. Him, not so much. A single slip-up, and his best friend is dead at his feet, and nothing will ever be the same.He is thought to be nothing more than legend now, but his story is incomplete.(or: Morcant and Erdwin's backstory!)
Relationships: Erdwin & Morcant (Dragon Quest XI)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	Legends Never Die

There is a new boy at the temple.

He’s easy to pinpoint, because of his hair. Most of the disciples-in-training have removed their hair, but this one has refused to have his hair taken off. He doesn’t talk much, and when he does, the other people of the temple are faintly alarmed. He speaks in short snippets, and has a strange, almost metallic accent that none of them can identify.

The young disciples don’t like him. There’s a sort of agreement in place about it, spoken about in hushed tones or no tones at all.

_ Nobody wants to be friends with him. He’s so weird. He won’t even cut his hair off! What kind of disciple is he? Besides, what’s up with that birthmark on his hand? Where’s he from? Why’s he here? Did Grand Master Feng really find him outside in the snow? _

Most of the disciples obey their undisclosed promise.

One doesn’t feel the need to do so. It’s not a binding agreement. It’s not a contract.

One other disciple talks to him, welcomes him, even. One other disciple becomes his friend, despite the cost of losing all his other friends. One other disciple will train with him, and they will train harder than any of the others, and together, these two will become the legacy of Angri-La, told for centuries after they are both believed to be gone, even though only one of them is.

Someday, they will be partners, and ultimately, they will be each other’s downfall.

But right now, none of that has happened.

Right now, they’re just two boys meeting each other. The one with spiky black hair is crying, and the one whose blue hair is just starting to grow back reassures him that he’s okay, and promises not to let his own hair get cut. The first boy looks up, his eyes shimmering, and then he smiles, and then the other boy smiles too.

That’s enough for now. Just a single smile, a scrap of joy in a strange new world, full of snow and mountains and people like him.

The two quickly become best friends. They teach each other how to become better at their craft. They push each other to their limits. The spiky-haired boy has special powers, and no matter how much he explains, his friend cannot use them. Nobody else can. The blue-haired boy is okay with this. He teaches the other how to speak in full sentences, and helps him neutralize the accent and lower the pitch of his voice.

Sometimes, the spiky-haired boy tries to remember his home, or wherever it is that he was from before he arrived at Angri-La, but there’s some kind of block against it. All he ever sees is a place where the ground fades into blue at the edges, and the only place he’s seen a similar color of blue is in the sky and in his friend’s hair.

He asks Grand Master Feng about islands in the sky, but she denies the existence of anything above them, and tells him to go to sleep. It is just before sunrise, and he has not slept since he last woke up around nightfall three days ago. He passes off this thought as a result of his sleep deprivation, but instead of sleeping, he goes back to training. He’s only awake because Morcant is awake, and there is no way he’s going to pass out first.

Feng says that this is childish of them, and she chides them for their antics, but she never directly tells them to stop. She has seen their duels, and she can see the pure uncut power that flows from the mysterious boy’s hands. Morcant is her most talented disciple, and Erdwin is his counterpart. Without Morcant to train him, she fears that he would go out of control.

Erdwin and Morcant stay up for the next four consecutive days. Neither of them know which of them falls asleep first. This is the longest sleepless challenge they ever do, but they do others, like not opening their eyes, or not eating. The other disciples laugh at them, but when it comes time to face off, Erdwin and Morcant are always the only ones left at the end.

Once they are both believed to be gone, deprivation of various necessities such as sleep, food, and sight will become a standard part of the disciple training at Angri-La.

_ It’s funny how things work out, _ the new Grand Master Liu will say, once Feng has passed. He is one of the disciples who trained alongside the two partners, but he won’t believe that he lives up to their legacy. Every day that he runs the temple, every day that he trains new disciples, he will tell himself that he is not good enough, that it should be Morcant standing in his place. 

He will be wrong. It should not be Morcant, and neither should it be Erdwin. Truly, the single weakness that each of them have is their inability to achieve great things alone.

Like light and dark, one is not complete without the other.

***

There is a restless spirit in front of the gates.

Every day he knocks on the wooden doors of the walled city, asking to speak with the scholars within. He’s very polite, and he always asks in a civilized manner, but every day he grows more and more desperate. He does not grovel; he does not beg; he refuses to demean himself in order to be let in. He simply inquires.

The answer is always no.

The spirit isn’t dead yet. Some of them think that he is, but he has a physical body, and he is perfectly alive. It’s questionable how long he will remain this way, and this is the reason he knocks on the door so often. He doesn’t have much time left.

But it isn’t dying he’s scared of. He would welcome it, if only fate would be so kind as to provide him with the ability to do so. He’s tried - Goddess only knows how many times he’s tried - but every time the mysterious new power he’s acquired stops him.

No, he’s scared of the day when he finally loses the battle with the voice in his head.

The voice is also the power that is keeping him from dying.

He wonders about its extent on many a day, but he doesn’t want to test this theory, because it would mean using the power. When he uses the power, it speaks to him, and when it speaks to him, he is reminded of the terrible things he’s done. Nobody else knows he’s done them. Nobody else knows that he’s the reason the legendary Luminary is dead. Nobody else knows that his own greed is the sole reason the Dark One has not been truly defeated.

Morcant wants to be let into the city, because the scholars there might be able to find a way to subdue the demon inside of him. He’s tried the Royal Library in Sniflheim, and nothing has come up. He’s tried asking Grand Master Feng back in Angri-La, without specifying who he wants to perform an exorcism on, or why. She is the only one who may have figured it out.

The scholars are too intelligent to have missed it. They see that the spirit asking to enter is a force of evil, and they don’t take a single look at the man in front of them.

Someday, the Dark One will take him over, exploit his desire to find out how much power he has, his desire to gather more power by any means necessary. He tries his best to keep those desires in check. It’s hard. He’s starting to think it’s ingrained in his personality. He always wants more. No matter what he has, he wants more.

He finally bested Erdwin, but it doesn’t feel right. It feels the opposite of right. If only he could pretend this was only another training session. If only he could pretend the knife he’d used to stab his best friend wasn’t still coated in his blood.

It’s a perfectly normal day, just like any other, and so Morcant asks the current guard to be let in.

The person on shift is new, and they haven’t seen him before. They cower back in fear, and then they spit the refusal with distaste, like the words are poison in their mouth. They even go so far as to draw their blade on him. Perhaps they hope to end this once and for all.

Morcant is not so easily deterred. It’s a disgrace to his name, his legacy, that they think so.

Without warning, sheer darkness explodes from his figure.

The entire city is devoid of people, and the buildings are leveled. The only structure that remains is the tomb of books, the most secretive library in Erdrea. It is underground. The entrance is made of stone, and he walks down the stairs, his boots clicking softly and dangerously against the steps, as if to dare any remaining people to come out and face him.

When he walks into the main chamber, there are no books left. All that he can see are empty walls, with some strange rune designs on them, and a vibrant painting of a red-haired woman in a purple dress.

He spends the rest of the fast-dwindling time he has trying to make sense of the runes on the walls in the foolish hope that one of them will save him, save Erdrea from him.

It is a lost cause, but he tries, up until his very last moments.

***

There is a man who has been taken over by evil.

He resides in the space between, or in the kingdoms as a shadow, and he wanders around, looking for something to do, waiting, biding his time until he can make a move. The goal of the darkness inside of him is to rule over Erdrea. To be the most powerful thing in existence. And of course, as he and the evil are one, he wants the same thing.

That is what he tells himself.

He knows that isn’t completely true.

What he wants is to make up for what he has done, to prevent himself from falling to the voices that wanted him to murder his best friend. What he wants is to redeem himself, to have seen the Dark One fall and know that he did the right thing. What he wants is to be back at the temple in Angri-La, beside his friend, his partner, his other half, and to be congratulated by Grand Master Feng, and to have a life alongside his three companions, and to introduce Feng to Serenica and Drustan.

What he really wants is to turn back time, but of course that isn’t possible for them. He isn’t as naive as Serenica, and he knows there’s no undoing what he has done now that the Luminary is dead. They can’t shatter the sphere. The young sorceress is talented, but she knows nothing of the world yet, and she clings to the vain hope that she can outsmart time itself.

Morcant clings to the same hope, but the only way he can do that is to wait for the next Luminary. So he waits. He wanders in his half-real form, and the darkness consumes his soul more and more every day. It’s a fool’s move, a coward’s move, and yet he does it anyway.

For Erdwin, he is a coward, a fool, without a second thought. He would do it every time.

Drustan is a bit wiser than Serenica, so he uses a different strategy to achieve long enough life to see it. Not necessarily eternal life, but … extended. That's all they need. He researches the same things that Morcant has, except that he has a different goal. Drustan is brave enough to attempt the soul-cleaving spells. It is a high cost for immortality, but they are both willing. Morcant tries it too. It doesn’t work.

He watches as Drustan does the exact same thing, and feels nothing but loathing when he succeeds. He takes years, and even goes so far as to found a kingdom before he leaves. His spirit resides beneath the ground of his place. Zwaardsrust. They call it the land of flowers.

Fed up with watching the kingdoms rise and fall (with the exception of Sniflheim and Angri-La, for nobody dares attack scholars or disciples), he moves along to the northern part of the land, the one that nobody has explored in years. He checks in at the tower of lost time, but he doesn’t plan to remain there for long. The place reminds him of what he no longer has.

He steps through the door, using a physical form for the first time in as long as he can remember, and it takes the form of his body. He doesn’t like it, so he disguises himself as a woman with similarly colored dark blue hair in a loose braid, wearing a purple cloak. He bases his new appearance on that of the late Grand Master Feng, the only person that might ever understand the true extent of what he’s done to himself.

In the tower’s interior he finds a creature that is not human, but they glow with a soft gentleness that he recognizes within moments, despite not having seen it in a century or more.

Serenica and Morcant stare at each other, and they don’t say anything, but they both think the same thing:  _ what have we become? _

It is only after he leaves the tower that he discovers that this physical form has left behind the darkness. It hasn’t won over him. He has won. He has beaten it. He is himself again.

He wonders how long it will be until they get reincarnations. He can’t wait to see what Erdwin’s will be like. Will they have his spiky hair, his shyness, his mark, his distaste for authority?

Ages later, Morcant finds a boy of about sixteen who has spiky hair and a certain glow in his eyes. The boy’s hair is blue, but he dismisses that as a coincidence. When he finds that in the boy’s future he will meet one with the mark and the shyness, and that they will become partners, he finally gets the message that Erdwin intended for him.

What remains of Angri-La’s greatest pair of disciples sinks to the ground in the middle of downtown Heliodor and cries. Nobody sees him. He is not much more than a ghost, but for the first time, he feels like he didn’t separate from the darkness in vain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would apologize, but I wouldn't mean it. I'm not sorry.
> 
> Loosely inspired by parts of Act I Phnon Nonh! Which is where part 2 will take place!
> 
> In case you didn't notice, this is only part 1, and there will be another chapter in which Erik shows up and the Seer does fun stuff. Heh. So, uh, get ready for that.
> 
> If you liked this please please please leave me a comment / kudos!!! It would mean the world to me! Especially since this is one of the stranger things I've written ...


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